femme mag

19-year-old Milly Toomy, more
commonly known by her stage
name GIRLI, is likely to be your
middle-aged Conservative father’s
worst nightmare. Fluorescent
magenta locks drape her unconventionally
painted face, stick-andpoke
tattoos cover her traditional
English rose complexion, and profanities
are generously sprinkled
throughout her patriarch-attacking
lyrics. To us young femmes,
GIRLI is the perfect revolutionary
role-model teaching us to stick
our middle finger up to the world,
as we attempt to exist in a time of
political uncertainty, mass gender
inequality, and a time where Donald-fucking-Trump
is essentially
the most important person in the
world.
In such a quite frankly uncomfortable
time, it’s important to have
role-models like GIRLI to say “you
know what, screw this. Be yourself,
and forget what anybody else
thinks”. Girli is fully aware of her
unorthodox appearance, firing
“Don’t you think you would look
nicer with brown hair / When you
have children they’ll sit in their high
chair / Look at their mummy and
see the disaster / Don’t you forget
that appearances matter” in her
most recent single ‘Not That Girl’.
Her avante-garde appearance and
don’t-give-a-toss attitude to style,
both musically and fashionably,
comes as somewhat of a refreshment
to us millennials, where
we’ve ultimately been brainwashed
to conform to gender
stereotypes and uniform style
since birth. “My parents always
talked about politics at home and
spoke their minds, which taught
me that it was good to have an
opinion and discuss issues”, Girli
admits. Unfortunately, debates and
discussions of important issues,
like gender inequality, are rare to
come-by without a bit of prodding
nowadays, so kudos to Papa and
Mama GIRLI.
The singer’s encouraging upbringing
has definitely had a positive
effect on her music. Her music,
which mirrors the style of PCmusic
and Harajuku bubble-gum
pop, certainly stands out from
the majority of music around
today. If you’re a young female
musician just starting out in the
industry, it’s likely that people will
assume you’re going to sing your
bog-standard standard Saturday
night X-Factor ballad. The assumption
is dreadful, but undeniably
something that has been ingrained
into all of us over the past 50-odd
years; women sing sad, slow, ladylike
songs. This expectation to live
up to society’s standards, especially
musically, is something that
Girli addresses in one of her earliest
singles ‘So You Think You Can
Fuck With Me Do Ya’. “Hey, you
thought I was gonna do a ballad? /
Fuck off” is what the singer howls
after a verse of singing perfectly